So much QQ, you'll need a flotation device.

“Buff” Your Reflexes

There’s an interesting little mechanic related to key presses and WoW, which some of you probably know all about. But I’d bet currency of some sort that there are many of you don’t. So allow me to enlighten you.

When you press a key, nothing happens. The button itself is lit up on your client, showing you which spell you’ve selected to cast. But it does not transmit the request to cast the spell until you release the key. If you have a button pressed, you can continue using other abilities as normal. The pressed key doesn’t interfere at all.

Most of you have probably noticed this behaviour, but how many of you have actually trained yourself to take advantage of it? If you have, epic kudos to you, you rock so hard.

For the rest of you… consider the following.

You have Counterspell bound to F. You are fighting a shaman in some… PvP place thingy. Suddenly he gets a haste buff of some sort, and pops a 0.9 second Lesser Healing Wave on himself.

For most people, they react like this:

Recognize that there is a spell to be interrupted

Move a finger to the F key

Press the key

Release the key

How much time individual steps take vary from person to person, how alert they are, if they were watching for a heal, etc etc.

But imagine if the situation was slightly different… What if, anticipating the need to Counterspell, you simply held down the F key and waited for the spell?

As I mentioned above, simply holding down the key does nothing. You can still frostbolt, summon elementals, ice block, blink, whatever, while holding the key down.

That same shaman suddenly tries to pop off a 0.9 second Lesser Healing Wave. You would react like this:

Recognize that there is a spell to be interrupted

Release the key

See how much faster that was?!

I call this method “pre-pressing”, but there has to be a less gay term for it.

Obviously pre-pressing is not just limited to PvP applications.

Try this, raiding mages.

By now, I’m sure all of you use Quartz.

Try this. Press your nuke button, let’s say Fireball. Immediately press they key down again, in preparation for the next one. That way, when Quartz hits the red latency zone, instead of doing the whole press and release thing, you just do the release thing.

You can, of course, use this method to react lightning fast to things like Missile Barrage and Hot Streak.

Depending on your personal reflexes and latency, something this simple could easily cut your effective reaction time by a tenth of a second, if not more.

And if that doesn’t sound like a lot of time… well… even if you only cut out a tenth of a second with each cast, that could easily be a full extra second of DPS every 20 seconds. A full extra second where, before, your character was standing idle.

i’ve been trying out quartz on my druid for the past 2 days and that’s exactly what i was doing – does it make me very smart? actually, i’ve been doing it on my mage without quartz too, simply because i need something to do with my finger during that enormous cast time.

I’ve never tried or noticed this… like, ever, lol. I could have sworn that when I press a button to activate an ability it casts on the press not the release. For instance while casting and I need to CS someone, I use a stop casting macro that I swear activates on the press. Does this work (I won’t believe it until I see it, lol) only with non-macro’d abilities? I’m worse off than kyrilean, I still have 10 hours of work to go!

Great point, this is something I’ve done more or less for a while now. As an affliction warlock, it’s pretty easy to predict what’s coming up next (we’re very rotationally dependent as you well know)… so I’ll often press the next button early and wait for the exact end of a spell (or the red latency area) to release it. I’ve never really used it in a “counterspell” type application though, but obviously that’s another good use.

At the very least, I do it when you get the unfortunate interruption that locks you out of a spell or whatever… I’ve often already pressed the key out of pure reflect, but don’t want to get the annoying message telling me I can’t do that now. Thus, I hold the button and wait for the debuff to leave. That’s less of a DPS gain, but it certainly helps an annoyance level :-).

I never knew this before. I always figured (apparently stupidly?) that as soon as your computer->server recognized that a button was pressed, it triggered the action…not when it “stopped being pressed.” I suppose it makes sense now that you’ve made me think about it, but it still seems a little backwards.

I play a rogue and am leveling a DK. Rogues have pretty tight rotations – not ridiculously tight, but one lag spike or hesitation and your dps goes down significantly, say if SliceNDice falls off. With <.5GCD, granted the amount of time saved isn't a lot, but if it saves me the extra second I need before SnD or Rupture falls then this tip is extremely valuable.

You don’t really need to do this for chain casting spells for dps, WoW has something called spell queuing, which basically means that when you press a button near the end of the current cast (im unsure of the threshhold), that spell will get cast immediatly following end of your current spell.

I thought that was the case as well and this would have little effect. Besides the boost in overall DPS, I could see it on my screen when I had a Hot Streak proc. I would be holding down my Pyro key, waiting for the current spell to complete and I swear they went off at the same time. The graphics were literally on top of each other.

When I tried it the usual way, there was a distinct delay graphically between the first spell and the Pryo.

So using this method in combo with Quartz, I saw my DPS just take off.

i expect that most raiders are already using some combination of quartz and anticipation to grab at least part of this haste, but clearly there’s a LOT of haste on the table. and over time, a getting even a little bit more goes a long way.

Press my polymorph button –> as soon as I press the button the tank goes afk and I panic while still holding the button down –> oh look! As long as my finger is on the button, nothing bad happens. Hooray!

I use that – or a varient that I picked up as a habit somewhere along the way on my Mindflay when I cast more then one in a row( which is a fair bit) but I hadn’t considered this for other spells like a dispell, It would work very well with a gaming mouse, eg on a thumb key – you can just hold your thumb on the mouse, and it doesn’t change any other finger positionings and then when required release it.

I was reading your blog, enjoying it, planning to bookmark it for future following, when I got to that line. C’mon, ‘gay’? You seem like a smart enough guy, you write well, what in the world would make you use slang like that?

I have been a buttonsmasher in the past ( I blame street fighter II for that) and demloished many keyboards and controllers (lotus racing anyone?), I´ve overcome this habit by “pre-pressing” or waiting with pushed button for the GCD to turn, instead off hammering on the keyboard until something happens.

This addon accelerates key bindings so that they are activated by key press rather than key release. This allows you to activate your abilities faster than you could otherwise. This can really make a difference for situations where you need to react quickly, like when casting heals, when dispelling, when interrupting spells, or in PvP. In these situations, the addon can have an effect similar to reducing your network latency by 100ms. Of course, the exact impact depends entirely upon how much time you personally spend between key press and release.

Together with quartz, this really helps a lot. I press my arcane blast when I enter my latency part of my cast bar and the next cast starts. I’ve only been messing around with it for a short amount of time. But my best result so far was 10k dps on Ick in the Pit of Saron. (I got 2.3K sp and 880 haste)
Was an awesome feeling, so much dps on a single target in a heroic.